Hi Mark,

well your posting of John Winthrop's 'city on a hill' has certainly 
stirred up some debate;) I thank you for it, whilst I confess that I'd 
never read that passage so closely heretofore. I write from the old 
world. From Suffolk, which county provided the largest of those who 
sailed with the Massachusetts Bay Company that Winthrop was a leader of 
in 1630 (a decade after the Pilgrim Fathers from Plymouth that was just 
over a decade after the wreck of the 'Sea-Venture', also sailing from 
Plymouth to Virginia, blown off course to Bermuda and the subject of a 
fascinating alternative narrative in Linebaugh and Rediker's 'The 
Many-Headed Hydra which I would urge you to read).

Winthrop's motivations for sailing to the 'new world' were mixed; 
presumably they who sailed alongside him were also, including long-term 
fallout from Tudor enclosures (possibly), pioneer spirit, business 
opportunism, the dystopian allure of tabula rasa, those whose land 
hunger was not satisfied . . .

I quote from  The Winthrop Fleet of 1630 by Charles Edward Banks
                              published Boston 1930:

'By the summer of 1629, Winthrop had practically decided to throw in 
his lot with the Massachusetts Bay Company.  His reasons as stated in 
his family letters were the constantly increasing expenses of a grown 
and growing family with no prospects of  additional income and the 
urgency of the stockholders in the Company that he undertake the 
leadership of the organization. 'If he lett pass this opportunitie,' he 
recorded on a personal
memorandum, 'that talent which God hath bestowed uppon him for publicke 
service is like to be buried.'  Whether this pessimistic view of his 
chances of development and success at home was justified is an 
unanswerable question, but it is clear that his decision was based on 
material rather than spiritual grounds.  He said nothing that indicates 
his dissatisfaction with the Established Church.'

That's of interest. John was the son of the 'lord' of a small estate. 
He studied law, enabling him to settle landlord-tenant dispute, collect 
rents and so forth. He was a land owner and land manager. But he'd also 
become a Puritan (I can't resist the image of Michael Clarke dancing to 
The Fall's 'Hail the New Puritan' as I type that word) with its 
attendant pious baggage. I too have a secular mind (although there a 
Methodist boyhood), so whilst I can to an extent understand 
Christianity and Islam intellectually I cannot understand belief in one 
God (other than perhaps in a pantheist or animist sense) one iota. 
Anyway in Winthrop we have a Puritan Christian (with at least 11 
servants) land-owning lawyer, who feared missing his opportunity to 
exercise leadership and as Christopher Hill writes 'believed that God 
was abandoning England'. Hmmm.

Joseph Schafer argues that:

'as the Church grew more politicized and hostile to Puritan ideas, it 
became clear to John that there was little or nothing he could do to 
reform the Church from within. He did not want to start a war that he 
could never win. Also, his son Henry became somewhat rebellious, and 
John began to worry that he might lose his children to the godless 
popular culture. At the age of forty-two, after a painful struggle, 
John decided that the only real choice was for him to take his family 
and move away from England. Rather than fighting political battles with 
the authorities, he would quietly move away to a new land where he 
could worship God freely and raise his children in an environment of 
faith. . . At that time, John Winthrop wrote an essay that laid out the 
main reasons why sincere Christians should consider moving to the New 
World. The first four reasons were: 1. To carry the gospel to the New 
World, to bring the fullness of the Gentiles into the kingdom of God. 
2. To escape God's judgement that was coming upon the corrupt churches 
of Europe. 3. To help solve the problems of overpopulation and poverty 
in England, where human life was being devalued and people were 
regarded as less valuable than horses and sheep. 4. To obey the Great 
Commission and Genesis 1:28, which says, "Be fruitful and increase in 
number; fill the earth and subdue it."'

Mark if you have access to the other reasons I would dearly love to 
read those too. You know I begin not to read WInthrop's 'city on a 
hill' (don't you just love that indefinite article?) as running away 
from Winstanley's later vision of the communalist Digger Commonwealth, 
with earth as a common treasury for all. So I'll take that back. In 
particular when I read later from The Arbella Covenantor "A Modell of 
Christian Charity" (1630)

'God Almighty in His most holy and wise providence, hath so disposed of 
the condition of mankind as in all times some must be rich, some poor; 
some high and eminent in power and dignity, others mean and in 
subjection. First, to hold conformity with rest of His works, ... 
Secondly, that He might have the more occasion to manifest the work of 
His spirit, ... Thirdly, that every man might have need of other, ... 
All men thus (by divine providence) ranked into two sorts, rich and 
poor, under the first are comprehended all such as are able to live 
comfortably by their own means duly improved, and all others are poor, 
according to the former distribution. There are two rules whereby we 
are to walk, one toward another; justice and mercy. ... There is 
likewise a double law by which we are regulated in our conversation, 
one towards another; in both the former respects, the law of nature and 
the law of grace, or the moral law of the Gospel. (1) For the persons, 
we are a company professing ourselves fellow members of Christ; (2) the 
care of the public must oversway all private respects by which not only 
conscience but mere civil policy doth bind us; (3) the end is to 
improve our lives to do more service to the Lord, the comfort and 
increase of the body of Christ whereof we are members; (4) for the 
means whereby this must be effected, they are twofold: a conformity 
with the work and the end we aim at. ... Thus stands the cause between 
God and us: we are entered into covenant with Him for this work; we 
have taken out a commission, the Lord hath given us leave to draw our 
own articles, ... if we shall neglect the observation of these articles 
... the Lord will surely break out in wrath against us. ... Therefore, 
let us choose life, that we, and our seed may live; by obeying. His 
voice and cleaving to Him, for He is our life and our prosperity.'

His economics looks less like a commonwealth then, more a version of 
trickle-down. Certainly not a form of socialism. The basis upon which 
the rich and the poor 'walk, one toward another' are the dispensations 
of justice and mercy assembled under the aegis of 'the law of nature 
and the law of grace, or the moral law of the Gospel'. If one doesn't 
share that God one is evidently in trouble. His model doesn't account 
for equity in the sense of any dissolution of the boundary between rich 
and poor. It is already a profoundly and radically conservative vision.

Combine that with Winthrop's apparent authoritarian tropes, made 
against him by his peers and the ingredients are present for some 
justifications based upon access to the counsel of God that rudely 
mirror the equating between Sovereign between King and Godhead l8r 
clung to by Charles as the Civil War broke out.

Furthermore I don't get any sense of city as in conurbation from 
Winthrop. He's a country boy and he formulates community along the 
lines of English rural classes in the 16th and 17th centuries.

love and love
cris


On 10 Jun 2004, at 18:14, Mark Weiss wrote:

> In the morass of pious hypocricy with which we're all being bathed, at
> least in the US, one speaker after another has quoted John Winthrop's 
> great
> sermon aboard the Arabella, flagship of the Puritan fleet, as it lay at
> anchor in what would become Boston harbor. There's a long tradition 
> behind
> this, and behind the conflation of what Winthrop actually meant (it's 
> right
> there in the words) and the rhetoric of the New Jerusalem, so that the 
> city
> upon a hill has become the shining city upon the hill. Winthrop used 
> the
> phrase not as a hope but a warning--that there will be no place to 
> hide. I
> present the pertinent paragraph below. If we get past the god stuff 
> what's
> left doesn't read much like the commonwealth that Reagan or his heirs, 
> all
> of them first-class sons-of-bitches, had in mind--in fact, it sounds a 
> lot
> more like Eurosocialism. Winthrop, by the way, was one of the 
> architects of
> American genocide. But hell, he wrote well.
>
> Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our 
> posterity,
> is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk
> humbly with our God. For this end, we must be knit together, in this 
> work,
> as one man. We must entertain each other in brotherly affection. We 
> must be
> willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of
> others' necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all
> meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality. We must delight in each
> other; make others' conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn 
> together,
> labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our 
> commission and
> community in the work, as members of the same body. So shall we keep 
> the
> unity of the spirit in the bond of peace. The Lord will be our God, and
> delight to dwell among us, as His own people, and will command a 
> blessing
> upon us in all our ways, so that we shall see much more of His wisdom,
> power, goodness and truth, than formerly we have been acquainted with. 
> We
> shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be 
> able
> to resist a thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and
> glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, "may the Lord make 
> it
> like that of New England." For we must consider that we shall be as a 
> city
> upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall 
> deal
> falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him 
> to
> withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a 
> by-word
> through the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil 
> of the
> ways of God, and all professors for God's sake. We shall shame the 
> faces of
> many of God's worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned 
> into
> curses upon us till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are 
> going.
>
>
> Mark
>